


Fire and Ice

by GofyTomcat1



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:42:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24275293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GofyTomcat1/pseuds/GofyTomcat1
Summary: An expanded version of Jyn and Cassian's confrontation on the shuttle leaving Eadu.
Kudos: 2





	Fire and Ice

_“Fire!”  
  
The piercing staccato of Imperial blasters rang out in the distance, and Jyn watched her father’s scientists die. Then more flames, smoke, an inferno of endless destruction, as the flight of X-Wings deployed their payload over the platform, and Krennic, and her father. The world became engulfed in a searing flame, a blaze of light that could not be ended. The inferno consumed everything, leaving only ash and ruin in its wake. She screamed aloud as she tried to escape the flames..   
_  
_There was no escaping it._  
  
***  
”Jyn!” someone - she couldn’t identify who - shouted.

The voice shook her thoughts back to the present. The memory of the searing blaze faded away into the background, and she sat up in the Imperial shuttle’s cargo bay, her mind still surrounded by the glow of the orange flames. Even as the Guardians whispered words of comfort and prayer to one another as they staggered aboard the cargo vessel that Bodhi had just purloined, Jyn could only watch in horror as she relived the scene she had just witnessed over and over in her mind: the world consumed by the glow of the explosion, the flickering of the flames amidst the pounding of the rain and the howling of the wind, the sound of Papa’s voice as he faded in her arms...

A part of her knew the time had come to make her choice. The fires of the Empire’s war machine had just taken the last hope she had left to believe in, consumed Galen Erso just as they had consumed Mama and Saw and anyone else who had tried to grow too close to her. Even as the flames of Eadu seared into her resolve, she felt another fire blazing in her soul, a flame she had never before been able to channel or control. She had used it, felt it, known it, but never before had she been able to unite with it, to give herself to it and let it consume her willingly. 

That fire was called rebellion.  
  
As Cassian staggered aboard, rifle clutched tightly in his hand, she felt the familiar sting of betrayal burn against her cheeks. It ate away at her, consumed her, burned her like the Alliance’s proton-bombs had burned away the Imperial defenses. The rage she had suppressed this long began to spark within her.   
  
“You lied to me.” she said to Cassian, her words stoking the blaze.  
  
“You’re in shock,” he replied, frowning at her. He met her gaze, his own aura of intensity blazing before her, landing in her path and daring her to approach. His brown eyes, usually soft and sympathetic, had hardened into a wall of iron resolve, a shield of professionalism and military professionalism that wouldn’t be so easily broken.  
  
But even an iron will could melt. Even a resolve of steel could be reshaped, reforged into something more malleable and more useful to her cause. 

Assuming, of course, it was properly tempered.  
  
“You went up there to kill my father,” she told Cassian with a glare of defiance. The flame of rebellion burned deeper into her soul. For just a moment, Jyn wanted to unleash it, to let it consume her and Cassian and the entire Rebellion in a single burst of rage, but she concealed her anger. The time had not yet come to ignite her spark just yet.

His reply came silently, a cold and piercing gaze that bored straight into her soul.  
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
“Deny it.” Her voice flared slightly, igniting a spark of resolve within her soul. The time was now, she told herself. Papa’s attempted murderer wasn’t about to escape her wrath unscathed.   
  
“You’re in shock, and looking for someplace to put it. I’ve seen it before.”

Cassian’s gaze did not move. He stared at her with a coldness as frigid as the rain outside, and she felt the flames of defiance within slowly begin to flicker. This was a dangerous game to play, she told herself. If she did not keep the blaze aglow, she was more than certain that Cassian would stifle it quickly.

“I bet you have,” she snapped.

It was an impulsive thing to say, and she knew it, but she did not have time to take it back. Willingly or not she had ignited this confrontation. If she lingered too long, she was guaranteed to burn in the midst of her own flames.

Without thinking, she turned back towards the others. “They know,” she said, and her voice was red-hot with searing rage. None of the others stirred. A wise thing, she noted mentally. Better to avoid a firestorm than to be dragged into the center of it.  
  
Cassian gave her a concerned look. “Know what?” he mumbled, but Jyn refused to acknowledge him. 

“You lied about why we came here and you lied about why you went up there alone.”

Cassian shook his head, looking directly at Jyn with the coldness of a glacier. “I had every chance to pull the trigger, but did I?”   
  
The fire in Jyn’s heart roared to life once more. She started to speak, but stopped herself abruptly. Cassian had attempted to murder her father. He didn’t deserve to be spoken to.  
  
 _“Did I?”_ Cassian repeated, louder this time, with the force of a man who had seen all too much of the reality of war. There was a moment’s hesitation in his dark and weary eyes, but Jyn didn’t care to notice. The firestorm had engulfed her entirely now; any chance of calming the pyroclasm had vanished the moment the Rebel agent had first opened his mouth.

The others refused to speak. Caught between a blizzard of cold resolve and an inferno of unrestrained fury, they wisely chose to take shelter rather than join in confrontation. The pilot in particular seemed the most concerned, his gaze focused intently on his hands, trying to avoid either Jyn or Cassian’s ire.  
  
“You might as well have,” Jyn said, her emerald eyes ablaze with the fury of a solar flare. “My father was living proof and you put him at risk. Those were Alliance bombs that killed him.” At these last words, she turned away, forcing away the thoughts of fire and destruction that still lingered around her. They came at her suddenly, overwhelming her control, and she staggered back, trying not to show Captain Andor any trace of weakness. 

This was her rebellion now, she told herself. Now was the time to prove she could stand the reality of it.

All at once, the glacier surrounding Cassian Andor’s resolve melted away into the darkness. A second firestorm replaced it, melting through the silence, burning its way towards her without mercy or hesitation. 

“I had orders! Orders that I disobeyed!” he shouted, and his words stung against her mental shields like the fallout of an eruption. His mask of espionage and secrecy had melted away in the aftermath of her flaring anger, leaving another flame-storm lingering before her.

“But you wouldn’t understand that,” he added.

Even as the ground before her seemed to erupt and fall away, Jyn stoically refused to give ground. She had him now: in her mind’s eye she could picture his defenses crumbling away to ashes before her. 

“Orders? When you know they’re wrong?” Her memory collapsed away into the painful visions of her past which still burned away visions of Saw and the Partisans, of Mama and Papa and the ruination of Jedha. Smoke clouded her vision, and for a moment she wanted to surrender, to allow Cassian’s firestorm to snuff out her own and end her pain.

No, she told herself. She would not burn away here, consumed by the ruination of her broken past. If any flame was going to be snuffed out tonight, it was going to be Cassian’s.

“You might as well be a stormtrooper,” she told him, a light filling her emerald eyes. _“You might as well have commanded the Death Star.”_ Jyn did not speak these last words aloud, but she thought them, relished them, used them as fuel to feed her blazing rage. The memory of the Empire’s superweapon over Jedha spurred her anger on; for just a moment she allowed herself to embrace the Imperial weapon’s destructive potential. Andor deserved that much, she scoffed to herself. His was a crime she could not simply ignore.

“What do you know?” Cassian’s own anger flared, and he paused to tower over her, his dark eyes glowing like a pair of embers. “We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something.” 

He paused, contorting his expression to match her earlier sneer. “Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Some of us live it. I’ve been in this fight since I was _six years old! You’re not the only one who lost everything._ _Some of us just decided to do something about it.”_

The fire in Cassian Andor flickered and faded once more, replaced with the same cold distance she had first witnessed. But the fire in Jyn Erso did not die. She stood alone, staring into Cassian’s eyes, and resolved to keep it burning. She would keep it ablaze, keep it blazing even as the darkness of the Empire attempted to consume her, and use it to spark the feelings of rebellion in the Council on Yavin. 

Together, they would spark the flame that would burn the Empire’s Death Star into ashes.


End file.
